The artist's work sells for millions, so no surprise that his posters for Barcelona's last bullfight are disappearing from the streets

A picador looks on before a bullfight at the Monumental bullring in Barcelona, Spain. Sunday will see the final fight before bullfighting is banned in the Catalan capital. Photograph: David Ramos/Getty
David Ramos/Getty Images

With bullfighting to be banned in Catalonia at the end of this year, Barceló asked to paint the poster for the Catalan capital's last bullfight.

The fight, on Sunday, features Barceló's friend José Tomás as one of the three matadors. It closes the season, and marks the death of bullfighting at the city's Monumental bullring.

Miquel Barceló's poster for Barcelona's last bullfight -

Barceló's poster has provoked a frenzy of art madness, with fans of both the artist and bullfighting desperately trying to get their hands on what is already a collector's item.

Queues have formed outside the offices of the fly-posting company charged with pasting them onto the city's walls.

"In 30 years of fly-posting I have never seen anything like it," company boss Carles Cunillera told Barcelona's La Vanguardia newspaper. "We have had to tell people we can't give them away."

José Tomás is one of the most popular matadors of the moment, and is especially adored by those bullfight-loving artists and intellectuals who criticise the Catalan ban for censoring what they see as an art form.

Barceló, whose works sell for more than those of any other living Spanish artist, designed another poster for Tomás in 2007, when the bullfighter came out of a five-year retirement.

Tomás is a famous risk-taker and only recently came back after 15 months recovering from a goring suffered in a Mexican bullring.

Although the bullfight has been in decline in Barcelona for decades, Tomás had made the city's Monumental one of his favourite bullrings – turning in historic performances and making it fashionable for some locals to watch bullfighting once more.

Tickets for Sunday's fight sold out immediately and are now being touted at over three times face value – or more than £200 for a seat in the shade.

Tomás, meanwhile, has donated money to the Barcelona bullfighting school were young locals can learn to handle the matador's cape and sword – ensuring its future for another year.

Last year the Catalan regional parliament voted in favour of a popular petition to ban bullfighting at the end of 2011, though other local forms of bull-games will survive.

Critics claimed local politicians had targeted bullfighting, an emblematic Spanish pastime, as a way of proving that independent-minded Catalonia had a separate identity from the rest of Spain.